Navigation

User login

Light your mind at night, reflect done deeds & invent tomorrow. Following Socrates ... dialog with passion, not to declare single Truth, but to strenghten mutual arguments to counter dogma, and to keep awake, so to experience this universe of intense beauty & sensation.

Shanghaied into Chinese

Sun, 16/11/2008 - 15:50 — patho

Learning mandarin Chinese (a.k.a. "pu tong hua") is a real challenge compared to most European languages. In some ways it is easy, as words do not change with gender, number or even tense, and there are few grammatical traps. However you got to pronounce the five tones correctly (flat, down-up, up-down-up, up-down, neutral) and peculiar sounds such as "c", "x", "ch", "sh", "zh" ... (as transcribed in pinyin) or you might say very rude or totally absurd things without being aware. Moreover mono-syllabic words are combined in strict sequences to create correct meaning. That is of course without the added complexity of the writing.

More then fifteen years ago I followed two consecutive year with the "Association Belge-Chine" but I gave up due to work pressure and lack of tanglible results. This year Xiao Mei - a friend of ours - started her own school - hosted at Floralia in Sint-Lambrechts-Woluwe, so this "academic" year - motivated by my stay in Beijing during the Olympic Games - I decided to go for a second attempt. Indeed our young teacher Qin is having hell of a job conditioning Sean (8 year), his sister Lynn (5 year), Camille (12 years), Valentine (9 years), Mareva (13 years) and myself (38 years).

So far we are able to greet, talk about class, family, food, animals, think in time and sing along a couple of songs. Compared with my previous experience, I feel like moving at warp speed, and I really got to study to keep up. Amazing how easily kids soak up languages, and they listen carefully to the teacher as well, as opposed to adults, who tend to be more interested in their own stories. Maybe I am not yet that fluent, but I got faith that this time I will be making real progress. Elsewhere on my site - in the wiki - I created a dynamic vocabulary and a training game.